The Asus ROG Mothership Is an Insanely Impressive Portable Gaming PC With a Twist

Asus just revealed a new portable gaming PC at CES 2019, and while we’ve seen plenty of gaming laptops and “portable PCs,” the ROG Mothership is perhaps the most unique design we’ve seen in years. It’s also the most impressive piece of tech we’ve seen in a package this small. Seriously, this thing packs a serious punch.

Instead of folding straight up like a typical laptop clam-shell design, the ROG Mothership’s screen detaches completely from its keyboard, and stands upright on a stand. This allows more versatile play configurations at home or on the go, but more importantly, it allows for more a more dynamic airflow solution to keep this thing cool. Here’s a quick video to give you an idea of what we’re working with:

Keeping this thing cool will definitely be a priority, because packed behind that bright, vibrant screen are an Intel i9-8950HK overclocked to 4.84GHz, and an RTX 2080 GPU with 8GB of GDDR6 video RAM. This guy boasts up to 64GB of RAM as well. Needless to say, you’re going to be playing your games on Ultra settings, at 144 FPS, and you’ll be more than capable of experimenting with ray-tracing.

So how is Asus going to pack all of that tech into such a small space and keep it cool? “Factory overclocked chips generate a lot of heat,” Asus explains, “so they’re covered by a network of eight heatpipes that transfer thermal energy to the heatsinks at the edges. The pipes are linked to the CPU, GPU, graphics memory, and VRM feeding them power. They stretch across four heatsinks lined with 375 ultra-thin copper fins. The fins are just 0.1 mm thin, allowing placement of more fins into each heatsink without impeding airflow.”

It’s an impressive piece of tech, and we can’t wait to see more. The ROG Mothership is scheduled to land in Q2 2019, and while we don’t have a price-point yet, we recommend you start saving now.